We are sorry to be losing our Administrator, Matthew Rogers, who joined us in November 2016, picking up the reins at short notice and administering CEM’s affairs cheerfully and diligently. He will leave us at the end of August 2017 to start work for his LLM. We thank Matthew for all he has done for CEM and wish him every success in his future career.

In Matthew’s place, we warmly welcome as our Administrator Adrian Horsewood, who is no stranger to the Cambridge early music scene. He read mathematics and philosophy at Jesus College, Cambridge before studying at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. As a baritone, he has performed all over the world, with many of today’s leading professional ensembles and as a soloist, and he also has extensive stage experience.

​He is a skilled musical editor and typesetter, and his scores, booklet notes, and translations have been used in performances and recordings across the world.

He sang with the choir of Trinity College while an undergraduate at Jesus College, and in the CEM Baroque Summer School of 2006. He lives in Chesterton with his wife and small daughter.

Cambridge Early Music is currently involved in an exciting education project alongside Cambridgeshire Music Hub and The Brook Street Band. The project - 'Getting a Handle on Handel' - aims to bring together young musicians aged 11-18 from schools in Cambridgeshire to broaden their knowledge and appreciation of early music. In two workshops held on 19th February and 16th March, led by the award-winning Brook Street Band, the students will immerse themselves in the music of Handel, Bach and Telemann, exploring Historically Informed Performance techniques including ornamentation, bowing and figured bass. The project will culminate in a short performance given by the young musicians during the Brook Street Band concert in the Howard Theatre at Downing College, Cambridge on 21st March.

Updates on the project, including photos, to follow...

To book tickets for the Brook Street Band concert on 21st March, which includes the student showcase, please go to our events calendar.

Cambridge Early Music is delighted to announce that it has recently joined REMA (the European Early Music Network). As one of the UK’s leading providers of early music education, the promotion of historically informed performance has been at the centre of Cambridge Early Music since its creation in 1993.

Dame Mary Archer, Chairman of Cambridge Early Music said: “We already enjoy inviting many European ensembles to perform in historic Cambridge venues at our annual Festival of the Voice and welcoming participants from across the globe to study at our renowned Summer Schools. By joining REMA we are excited at building further exciting and stimulating partnerships and projects with our European colleagues.”

REMA, the European Early Music Network, was created in Ambronay, France, in 2000. REMA now boasts a membership of around 70 Early Music organisations from 21 countries. The network’s head office is based in France.

REMA has a dual objective: to promote Early Music and to help raise its profile in Europe. REMA organises 3 to 4 meetings each year for its members, providing them with opportunities to exchange expertise, ideas, discuss their projects, form new networks and gain new contacts, as well as discuss current topics of interest.

Some examples of what REMA does:

Every two years, REMA organises a European showcase for young talent in Early Music.

REMA has created REMAPP, an application for smartphones in order to find early music concerts in Europe anywhere and at any time.

REMA regularly promotes its members’ activities.

REMA is a highly active networks and regularly hosts conferences about early music.

In this enticing programme, devised to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, Stile Antico presents a beguiling selection of music connected with the life and work of England's greatest writer.

Shakespeare’s plays and poetry brim with references to music. Stile Antico explores rare surviving settings of his words by his contemporaries Thomas Morley and Robert Johnson, alongside music connected to the great events of his lifetime.

Shakespeare’s chief patron was the Protestant James I, for whom Tomkins and Weelkes wrote extravagant coronation anthems. However, Shakespeare also had intriguing links with recusant Catholicism, whose supreme musical spokesman was William Byrd. Completing this fascinating picture are brand new settings of Shakespeare’s poetry by Nico Muhly and Huw Watkins, composed especially for Stile Antico.

Stile Antico is a British ensemble now established as one of the most original and exciting new voices in its field and has an extensive and award-winning discography on the Harmonia Mundi label.

Cambridge Early Music’s 2016 Summer Schools Showcase will run between Sunday 31 July – Friday 12 August. Join us as we explore the riches of Spanish Baroque and Renaissance music.

HIGHLIGHTS:

THE PARLEY OF INSTRUMENTSSpanish FollyThe Neapolitan violinist Nicola Matteis comes to London with Spanish and Neapolitan music in his luggage. The English viol player Henry Butler travels to Madrid, taking the English consort idiom with him; he inspires Andrea Falconieri in Naples to dedicate an English-style piece to him. Nicolaus á Kempis and Philipp van Wichel revel in the musical melting pot of the Spanish Netherlands. And everyone takes up toe-tapping Spanish tunes such as the Chacona and La Folia - the Spanish Folly.4.00pm Sunday 31 July 2016, Little St Mary's Church, CB2 1QG

THE PARLEY OF INSTRUMENTS with Philippa Hyde Father & Son, The Worlds of Alessandro & Domenico ScarlattiAlessandro Scarlatti worked in Naples for much of his career, while his son Domenico spent most of his life in Portugal and Spain. This concert illuminates their rich musical worlds by contrasting their sensuous settings of the Salve Regina and their colourful sinfonias, scored for recorder, oboe and strings.8.00pm Wednesday 3 August 2016, Jesus College Chapel, CB5 8BL

PHILIP THORBY & FRIENDSMusica en Nuestros TiemposJoin us for a programme of fireworks for viol, recorder and curtal featuring music by two virtuosos of their time: Diego Ortiz and Bartolomeo de Selma y Salverde. Selma wrote music in a broadly Italian style, but with unmistakeable Spanish characteristics. Although his music is in the new baroque style, he still wrote divisions on earlier vocal pieces (by composers such as Lassus and Palestrina) alongside modern canzonas, fantasias and sonatas.4.00pm Sunday 7 August 2016, Jesus College Chapel, CB5 8BL

THE INTREPID ACADEMY with Jennie CassidyOrphénica Lyra This programme uses viol consort, vihuela, lute and guitar both in instrumental works in music from the late fifteenth-century Palace Song-book of Ferdinand and Isabella, and later songbooks. Texts range from bawdy villançicos to David’s lament for Absalom – all infused with the passion and occasional darkness of renaissance Spain. 8.00pm Wednesday 10 August 2016, Jesus College Chapel, CB5 8BL

It is now over 200 years since Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France and still the “Corsican Ogre” both horrifies and fascinates us in equal measure. This ambivalence was also felt during his reign with some artists, such as Goethe, admiring Napoleon, others, were revolted by him, and some revised their opinions as history took it’s course. One of the most famous volta-face has to be that of Ludwig van Beethoven and his violent re-dedication of this 3rd Symphony – “The Eroica”.

Anneke Scott (natural horn) and Geoffrey Govier (fortepiano) perform a programme bringing together works by composers whose lives were turned upside down by Napoleon’s advancing armies, including music by Ries, Kuhlau and Krufft alongside Beethoven's magnificent Variations on a theme from the Eroica Symphony.

Although Francis Bacon, 17th century philosopher, statesman and visionary, is widely regarded as the father of modern science, his investigations into the nature of sound are little known. He was intrigued by seemingly magical effects like echoes and sympathetic vibration and sought to explain them through a series of experiments in, and observations of, sound.

Combining modern sound technology with ancient instruments, The Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments explore the aural illusions that so intrigued Francis Bacon and our 17th century forbears with fresh interpretations of 17th century music linked to each other by newly composed pieces. The performers play unusual and historically appropriate instruments including the mysterious violone, the jangling bray harp and the little known viola bastarda.

You can find out more about the project by watching this YouTube video.“What the Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments have concocted in 'Sound House' is a wondrous journey through a realm of unimaginable sonic possibilities; travel with them, and I guarantee that you will never think of sound in the same way again” – Early Music TodaySaturday 25 June 2016, 7.30pm, Wesley Methodist Church, CB1 1LGTHE PERFORMERSJon Banks: santouri, gothic harp, percussionLiam Byrne: lirone, treble violJean Kelly: gothic bray harp, triple harpAlison McGillivray: violone, viola bastardaJon Nicholls: sound designer and composerDevised and directed by Clare Salaman

​A celebration of choral repertoire in the hallowed chapels of St John’s College, Trinity College and Jesus College Cambridge, our 2016 Festival of the Voice (12-15 May) showcases exceptional home-grown talent which is now internationally regarded. Recognised as a hub of historically-informed performance and education, this year's Festival celebrates core composers Bach, Monteverdi and Gesualdo contrasting them with works by Schubert, Beethoven and Ligeti.

Our Artist-in-Residence is star a cappella group VOCES8. Winners of Classic FM’s Album of the Year 2015 for Lux, VOCES8 includes two Trinity alumni. Acclaimed tenor James Gilchrist is ex King’s, and The Gesualdo Six’s director, composer and organist Owain Park, is at Trinity. This year we also welcome Belgium stars Vox Luminis and the Three Medieval Tenors who exploreConductus, the forgotten song of the Middle Ages.

Especially for festival week, services by the world renowned choirs of St John’s College and King’s College feature works by Palestrina, Vivaldi and Bach.

Faye Newton sopranoPamela ThorbyrecorderSusanna Pell violJacob Heringman luteInspired by, and reflecting, the combination of instruments shown in Titian's painting entitled “Venus and Cupid with a Lute Player” (1555-65) on display at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, a programme of Italian Renaissance vocal and instrumental music will be performed by members of the Northern Early Music Collective on Saturday 30 April at 7.15 pm.

This marvellous painting is of particular interest from a musical point of view, in that it presents clear and realistic depictions of mid sixteenth-century instruments and musical part books. The programme takes these elements as a starting point, and centres on Italian (mainly Venetian) secular music of the sixteenth century, with special emphasis on love songs and on the repertoire of the middle of the century, the time in which the painting was created, by composers including Verdelot, Willaert, Ganassi, Ortiz and Arcadelt.

Tickets: £25, £20 (concessions and Friends of The Fitzwilliam Museum) including pre-concert refreshments available from 01223 332904 or by emailing education@fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk.

This concert is promoted in partnership with The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and will be performed in front of the painting.

If the sound of one bass viol was considered full and complete, then two of them is an embarrassment of riches. Yet this combination was popular first here in England, home to some of the first great virtuosos of the instrument, including Matthew Locke, Christopher Simpson and M de Ste Colombe, and then across the channel, just as the fashion for it waned in England, providing a continuity of music from Ferrabosco to Couperin. Join two of Europe's finest virtuoso instrumentalists, Christophe Coin and Richard Boothby, on 19 March for this special programme of Anglo-French music which explores the two sides of this sometimes complex, musically fascinating partnership.